Carmack frees Quake on GamesRadar is a Q&A with the id Software Technical
Director about Quake Live, id's upcoming free shooter (thanks
Voodoo Extreme). Along the way he offers thoughts on Crysis, expressing an
interesting perspective from someone who has spent so much time exploring the
cutting edge of game engine technology:

Obviously, we have examples like
World of Warcraft that show how the PC can be viable and vibrant in its own way.
But in terms of first-person shooters, if you look at something like Crysis and
say thatís the height of what the PC market can manage, I donít think thatís
necessarily that exciting of a direction for the PC to be going in the future.
With Quake Live, we hope that thereís an opportunity for people whoíve never
played shooters to give this a try, and with that, the potential of actually
growing the PC gaming market. I still have a lot of a faith in simple gameplay
formulas - it might not be the game that everyone plays for three hours a day to
be the best at, but itís something that offices, dorms, and schools across
America can have fun with.

Not yet possible. GTA4 required an expansive, populated, detailed environment. Which is pretty much impossible to have along with Crysis level graphics, due to fill rate and processor limitations.

Every game is a trade-off. You lower the quality in one area in order to have enough resources to improve the quality elsewhere. The goal is to design your trade-offs so that people don't mind, or notice.

Few people cared that the character models in GTA4 weren't that detailed, because you never got really up close and personal with a 3rd person game. The focus was on the large, detailed environments and the varied pedestrians you interact with. But cookie-cutter opponents that look and act identical are the norm in shooters like Crysis. Every game makes different choices.

But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Tons of fancy graphics mean less hardware left over to handle unique AI.

"Crysis might look superior but at the price of a 2000$ rig. All the engines Carmack produced were rather optimized at the time of release. I'm looking forward to playing Quake live, if just for old times' sake."

My 850 dollar upgrade plays Crysis at high at 30+++fps at all times. Not really sure where the 2000 dollar idea comes from.

And Doom 3 ran like a fucking WHORE when it was first released. And didn't really look all that great for what it was hyped up to be. The "real time shadows" were everything but real-time. (point in case, find a steel beam that has a light shining on it. Take your flashlight and shine it at the beam's shadow. Notice how the shadow doesn't vanish but just becomes lighter. Ergo, these shadows are simply mapped and not real time.)

We should probably give credit where credit is due. Even Carmack has to pay homage to the first, true 3D engine... Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss developed by Blue Sky Productions (later Looking Glass Studios... System Shock, Thief, et all). Unlike Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D, UU:TSA featured a freedom of movement not seen in Wolf 3D in that players could mouselook up and down. Truly an amazing feat in its day.

Ultima Underworld went much farther than that, actually. It was actually true 3D in that you could walk underneath a bridge, go up a flight of stairs, then walk on that self same bridge you just crossed under.

Engines like Doom and Build (Duke3D) couldn't do that, even though they came out quite a bit later than the Ultima Underworld engine.

Carmack has an axe to grind here so I wouldnt take his comments seriously. His Doom 3 was sadly terrible and Far Cry -- which came out a year before -- looked better and had a much better single player game. Of course he's gonna take a swipe at Crysis.

A game that's developed with the PC as joint-primary platform, purchased over Steam is to me far more appealing than a back-ported console game infected with SecuROM.

There's no such thing as "joint-primary" platform. There's lead platform and then there's everything else. If PC isn't the lead platform, then it's a port. Only difference is that the port usually comes out at the same time as the console versions.

DOOM3, both the game and the engine, were flops* but it's telling that he was still able to invent an upgrade and completely turn around it's biggest technical weakness (the megatexture for big open areas).

He's also doing more to keep PC gaming going than perhaps anyone other than Valve. Fundamentally Steam is an attempt to combat piracy by competing with it instead of simply trying to make piracy more difficult.

id Tech 5 meanwhile combats the threat from consoles by having a engine that is relatively platform-agnostic: the incremental cost of a PC version should be so low that it's a no-brainer. It also means that PC is part of the picture from the beginning, not done as an afterthought console back port released 6/12 months later.

Q3Z is another attempt to keep "our" kind of PC games going, an experiment to determine if it can work on the absolutely thriving web game model.

OK, so possibly Tech 5 may turn out to suck, the miss with DOOM3 makes it easy to be pessimistic. But I'll give him kudos for seeing the big picture and trying. What are most of the other big devs doing? Moving to consoles, quietly and alarmingly often, very loudly.

Sure, some really great PC-only games would be more welcome, and may do more to boost PC gaming. But my impression is that it's getting incredibly hard to get anything green lit if it's primarily for the PC. A game that's developed with the PC as joint-primary platform, purchased over Steam is to me far more appealing than a back-ported console game infected with SecuROM.

* It's quite plausable it still made money but I'd be highly surprised if the hit on the id brand didn't greatly outweigh that.

We should probably give credit where credit is due. Even Carmack has to pay homage to the first, true 3D engine... Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss developed by Blue Sky Productions (later Looking Glass Studios... System Shock, Thief, et all). Unlike Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D, UU:TSA featured a freedom of movement not seen in Wolf 3D in that players could mouselook up and down. Truly an amazing feat in its day.

Carmack's engines paved the way for Team Fortress (the quake mod) and Half-Life, and then, indirectly, Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. I'd say he's been more than relevant in the last 10 years.

Having said that, Cryengine 1 led to nothing but FarCry spinoffs but at least Cryengine 2 (according to Wikipedia) is being used in a handful of games currently in development. Still, CryTek doesn't hold a candle to Carmack's influence on the industry. CryTek doesn't even come close to Unreal engine in terms of industry influence.

I think Carmack picked Crysis strictly because it's got the prettiest engine on the market and it didn't sell very well despite it, NOT because he thinks it's as good looking as PC games can get (because it isn't) or because he thought it had revolutionary gameplay (because it didn't).

Crysis was PC Gaming's money shot and it choked; probably because of reputation it had for system requirments. Hell, somone on THESE forums thought it required Vista! That was probably at least partly because of the Games for Windows debacle, but that's another issue.

I'm still waiting for a game to make people look better than Half-Life 2 did so many years ago.

Exactly, and they improved the character details considerably with Ep2. The point is the attention to detail - eye movement, lip-sync, mannerisms - still hasn't been rivaled after three-and-a-half years. Realism isn't simply down to having higher polygon counts or higher resolution textures. The HL2 engine is far from the most technically complicated but it looks great and runs on most systems. I can't wait to see the improvements brought in Ep3/HL3. I'd also really like to see some decent UE3 games, though - that's another engine that has puts effort into realistic animations, it's just not been used for a slow and thoughtful game.

Half-Life was built with the Quake engine and heavily inspired by DOOM.

Although sort of true, it was 90% not Id code.

Carmack's last hit was Quake 3. That engine sold bucketloads. You think he's mattered in the near decade since? Then take a look at how many Doom 3 engine games are out there that aren't financed by Id. You can count the number on one hand. Factor in how terrible Doom 3 was, and you've got the worst selling major engine of this generation.

Not to say the guy isn't one of the best technical coders out there, but he really misplaced his efforts when he concentrated so hard on lighting beyond what most PCs could do.

Meanwhile, from what we've seen of Tech 5, it looks to continue his inability to do necessary lighting techniques like making humans not look like rubber. I hope he fixes that, as I've played one rubbery-human game too many. I'm still waiting for a game to make people look better than Half-Life 2 did so many years ago.

Crysis was shit, Carmack is essentially right. However he is pretty much irrelevant in todays pc game market and not the legend he once was, go design a nintendo DS game or something. Valve is the new ID.

Half-Life was built with the Quake engine and heavily inspired by DOOM. Show some respect.